IN HIS book, The Hundredth Monkey, Ken Keyes Jr wrote about a phenomenon which, he believes, may be our only hope as a species. In 1952, on the Japanese island of Koshima, scientists were feeding monkeys of the breed macaca fuscata with seed potatoes dropped on the sand. The monkeys liked the sweet potatoes, but not the sand in which they were coated.
An 18 month old monkey called Imo came up with the solution she washed the potatoes in a stream and taught her mother to do the same. Likewise her playmates, who also passed the trick on to their mothers.
Scientists watched as this discovery was relayed through the colony of monkeys. In the course of the next six years all the young monkeys learned to wash the potatoes in this way. Only those adults who imitated their young learned to wash the potatoes the remainder continued eating them with their coating of sand. Then, wrote Keyes, something startling occurred.
"In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes. Then it happened." By that evening almost every member of the colony was washing the potatoes prior to eating.
The point of the story? That the added energy of the hundredth monkey somehow created a breakthrough a critical mass had been reached.
This will be the Year of the Hundredth Monkey, the year when one of the most malignant ideologies in the history of humanity will be swept away. 1996 will be remembered as the year that Thatcherism finally died.
True, I have had this hope before, but this time I feel it in my bones. There may be those to tut tut a little on behalf of the peace process when I say that the disarray of the British Conservative Party is a joy to behold, but that risk is slight when compared with the burden that is about to be lifted from our societies.
IT IS not rose tinted nostalgia telling me that today we are infinitely more brutalised as a society than in 1979. So called modernisation is creating a massive slipstream of obsolescence, selfishness, poverty, consumerism, unemployment, individualism, addiction, materialism, alienation and economism. The brutalisation can be observed not merely in these phenomena themselves, but in the manner in which they are publicly debated.
Indeed, the brutalisation of our society can be measured by observing the media and the endless diet of gossip, sneering, vitriol and puerility, which would have been shocking in 1980 but is now accepted as normal. These developments cannot be said to be purely the product of Thatcherism. But the climate which Mrs Thatcher created enabled them to sprout with a vengeance.
Or look, if you can bear to, at our political system. Why is it so utterly bereft of vision, idealism, inspiration or ideas? Why is it that none of the aforementioned phenomena appears to be of the slightest concern to our political process?
Why is it that there is hardly a single politician on the political stage now prepared to put his or her neck on the block to say that the kind of society we are creating, based on selfishness and spite, is corrupt and corrupting? The alibi provided by the Thatcher revolution allows politicians to wash their hands of such obscenities while proclaiming their indifference as virtue.
United by economic orthodoxy and anti republicanism, our politicians bask in the approval of media which are themselves increasingly corrupted by the values which have seeped across the Irish Sea. And no, Your Lordships, I don't mean divorce, contraception or homosexuality, but greed, selfishness and the ideological back beat to make them into the driving rhythms of our society.
BUT there is hope on the horizon, arising, paradoxically and almost comically, from the congenital spinelessness of our political class. The hope resides in the person of Tony Blair, the leader of the British Labour Party, and in the racing certainty that he will, as the next prime minister of Britain, begin the long and difficult task of purging the malign effects of the Thatcherite plague from the British body politic and replacing it with a new political sensibility.
I've stuck my neck out about Tony Blair for a number of years now and have provoked the incredulous disapproval of my left wing acquaintances on this account. It is fashionable to dismiss Blair as a tailor's dummy, a watered down Thatcherite, a spin doctor's Frankenstein.
What convinces me that Blair is the genuine article is the very fact that he is being shot at by both sides. The "Tory" Blair gibe is not merely wrong, it is almost incredibly stupid. Blair is a young man who thinks fundamentally but is not fundamentalist, a serious and visionary humanitarian who has been forced, to a limited degree, to adopt the camouflage of the existing culture to ensure its dismantlement. He knows the Murdoch press, which owes its existence to Thatcherism, is still out there waiting to trip him up.
Which brings us neatly back home via Koshima island. Another surprising thing noticed about the potato washing monkeys, according to Ken Keyes, "was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then spontaneously jumped over the sea colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes." The meaning of this?
"When a certain number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind. Although the exact number may vary, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people knows of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people. But there is a point at which, if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness reaches almost everyone.
This, I firmly believe, will occur throughout Europe with what we will probably call Blairism. Almost overnight, the skepticism will lift and there will be a bright new day, a young politics for a new century. Irish politicians will then, of course, try to copy Blair's "formula". Usually that tendency brings us little but trouble, but this will be an exception. If we were able to adopt uncritically the rotten values of Thatcherism, we will surely be able to adopt the decent, positive values represented by Tony Blair.
Apart from the cynicism about Blair himself, we will also have to contend with the self hating voices telling us that we deserve the kind of society we are creating willy nilly. We do not deserve it, nor do we have to endure it. Things are bad, no doubt, but change is possible, and there is no reason we should not take such prompts or opportunities as may help to bring it about.